


we, a pair

by orphan_account



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 00:35:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20985887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Bruce has such small hands.





	we, a pair

Bruce has such small hands. Delicate hands. Wealthy hands. "Your hands must be insured for five thousand dollars each," Arthur tells him, no humor and only a whisper of embitterment, enraptured instead.

"You're strange," Bruce says to him - bluntly, as he says all things - as he wriggles his index finger into Arthur's mouth. He furrows his brow and presses his thumb into the hinge of Arthur's jaw, coaxing his mouth open wider. He pokes and prods at each and every one of Arthur's teeth - curious, of course, as all children are, but with concern knitting his features together more like a dentist than anything else - and adds, after a long moment, "You have bad teeth."

"I smoke," Arthur reminds him, though, with Bruce's fingers still inside of him, it comes out sound more like, "Ah, oak."

"Did your mother ever take you to get your teeth cleaned?" Bruce asks him, drawing his fingers out and wiping them with an uncharacteristic sloppiness onto his nice pants.

"She couldn't afford to," Arthur tells him. "And I brushed my teeth, anyway. Sometimes, I even flossed." The joke falls flat on its face in front of Bruce's apathy; instead, his upper lip curls briefly in irritation before he touches his hand to Arthur's cheek. He almost always touches Arthur like that, with the detached gentleness of a man stroking a dog.

"Brush your teeth," Bruce instructs him, "and come to bed with me."

-

Bruce rarely waits until nightfall to invite Arthur into his bed. He is meticulous in his routine, but, within that routine, he has made adjustments. Some of them of are small - he takes a single scoop of chocolate ice cream with his dinner, now, something that Thomas had forbade; he has retired the dress jackets that Martha had made him wear and insisted on purchasing comfortable-yet-tasteful sweaters, instead.

Some of them are big. Bruce seems to delight in the subversion of intercourse as something that a man and a woman do under a thick blanket of black and stars. Sex is one of the few occasions in which he smiles, though it certainly isn't guaranteed if Arthur doesn't perform well enough for him; he slots it neatly into the same block of time that he would recreation. And it is recreation to him, Arthur's big hands encircling his waist and his impoverished mouth on his cock. It's quite fun, usually.

Today, though, Bruce's stomach turns ever so slightly at the prospect of receiving oral sex. Even after brushing his teeth, they're still stained yellow, and his gums are bleeding at the high edges. No, today he wants to try something new.

The curtains are closed but the windows are open, and the mid-afternoon sunlight streams wet and lazy into their bedroom. Bruce had been insistent on leaving his bedroom untouched; similarly, he hasn't entered Thomas and Martha's bedroom since the murder. Instead, he's commandeered one of the many lavish guest bedrooms and transformed it into something chimeric, half-four-poster paradise with a mountain of pillows and silky-soft blankets, half-office space, with papers strewn across the wide mahogany desk against the wall and sheets of newsprint tacked to the wall.

There's a pile of clothing, now, too, at the side of the bed. It had taken a while for Bruce to mold Arthur into even the shadow of the butler that Alfred was, but he's improving every day, and Bruce doesn't anticipate having to remind Arthur to start a load of laundry when they're done. It makes him smile.

Arthur smiles, too. Bruce calls them "sympathetic smiles" - Arthur can't help but grin when he sees Bruce grinning, too. In fact, he'd even grinned at the alliteration of the term. Arthur finds genuine humor in such small things.

"I want to try something new," he starts. "Would you do that for me?" He already knows that Arthur would do anything that he asks, but he enjoys hearing it spoken out loud.

"Of course," Arthur says. He's already fully hard; Bruce admits to being intimidated the first time that he had seen Arthur's erection, clothed but straining in a way that must have been nearly unbearable, though they had only been kissing at the time, but the feeling had subsided quickly when Arthur made a tiny, almost pained sound into Bruce's mouth that made Bruce's own cock jump suddenly. Now, it's almost endearing, how quickly Arthur gets hard for him.

"I want to penetrate you," Bruce says, and it's so matter-of-fact that Arthur forgets to be surprised at first. It's only when Bruce moves his hand to cup one of Arthur's cheeks, fingers barely brushing against where his hole is were they only a little deeper, that Arthur says, "Oh."

"You said that you would do this for me," Bruce reminds him. "I saw some pictures of it, once, in a magazine. The man being penetrated was smaller than the man penetrating him, but the idea is the same."

Bruce motions for Arthur to pick him up, so Arthur does, and when Bruce wraps his arms around his neck and his legs around his waist, Arthur kisses his neck. "You're too small. You won't fit. You'll slip right out."

Bruce screws his eyes shut as Arthur kisses farther down his neck, to his collarbone. He doesn't like giving Arthur the upper hand, but Arthur's mouth feels so good on him, hot and wet and smelling of peppermint, that Bruce almost acquiesces and nudges Arthur onto the bed, onto his back, climbing onto his face to let Arthur at his groin, his hole.

"I want to try," Bruce insists after Arthur's mouth makes its way back up his neck and to his ear, sucking the lobe into his mouth. "It's supposed to - oh!" He breaks off, writhing in Arthur's arms, as Arthur sits on the bed and adjusts Bruce so that he's now in his lap. "It's supposed to feel good," he finishes as Arthur pulls away from him, finally.

"It does feel good," Arthur says. "It hurts, at first, but even that can feel good in its own way. Then it gets even better. But you're too small. I won't feel you inside of me."

"But I want to be inside of you," Bruce says, emphatically not pouting. "You're mine to do with what I wish, and I wish to be inside of you."

"Maybe when you're older," Arthur says. He looks more crushed than even Bruce feels, his frown deepening the crinkles in his face, his eyes practically pleading with Bruce to understand. The question of whether Arthur will still want him when he's older goes unspoken; Bruce could and would not believe otherwise.

"Alright," Bruce huffs. "If you won't let me penetrate you, then I'll have to let you penetrate me."

"I won't fit!" Arthur cries this time, though his hips roll in agitated arousal. Bruce lays a hand flat on Arthur's chest, urging him onto his back, and climbs on top of him, resting the cleft of his ass against Arthur's cock. Arthur looks enraptured again; it fills Bruce's chest with something like pride.

"You don't need to go all the way inside of me," Bruce reassures him. "Just try putting a little inside of me at first so that I can see how it feels."

"You need..." Arthur trails off as Bruce leans down to kiss him. He still tastes like peppermint, thankfully, though it's not overwhelming; neither is the smoky undercurrent of Arthur's last cigarette. He sucks Arthur's bottom lip into his mouth and shifts, spreading his legs a little more, when Arthur lets out a broken little noise. "You need to be wet for that," he finishes, once Bruce has given him his mouth back.

"Wet? With what? There might be some lotion in the guest bathroom - " Bruce starts, but Arthur shakes his head, his hair fanning out around his face. "No," he says. "No lotion. I want..." He trails off again.

"Tell me what you want," Bruce says, "or I'll leave you here." It typically takes the threat of Bruce's absence to get Arthur to admit verbally to wanting anything.

"I want you to sit on my face," Arthur says, sounding almost defeated. It's funny, in its own way, Arthur sounding like a proper mope while his cock leaves smears of pre-come on the small of Bruce's back as Bruce leans against it. Bruce opens his mouth to speak again, but Arthur puts a finger to his own mouth, shushing him. "There's something else I want to do, but you'll need to lie down on your stomach for it. Are you alright with that?"

Bruce had never heard the phrase, "Are you alright?" so much as he had after meeting Arthur. Thomas had always simply told him what to do and how to do it; the thought of him asking Bruce if he was alright with any of his instructions was alien to him - and it should grate on Bruce's nerves, the implication that he isn't mature enough to simply tell Arthur himself if he wasn't alright, but it's sweet. Naive, but sweet, like all of Arthur's kindest gestures.

"Of course," Bruce says, a little haughtily. "Now, be quiet. I need your mouth."

**Author's Note:**

> Title is (barely) from "Send in the Clowns."
> 
> This is the second of two fics that I started writing for /tv/ (then, after being kindly reminded that it exists, /cm/).


End file.
